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People who know how to test are extremely valuable. Specially when doing peer review/pair programming with (solving the blind's eye thing) Testing as a whole i

People who know how to test are extremely valuable. Specially when doing peer review/pair programming with (solving the blind's eye thing) Testing as a whole is not an easy task as it involves testing some really hard things: memory leaks, performance, UX, correctness of parallel and distributed algorithms/programs/systems. However, Wealthfront engineers probably put this position more into perspective [1]: We do not have QA team and do not want to have one, the reasoning is that if a human is involved in testing then there is a higher chance of missing things and you simply can't test all the site dozens of times a day. Granted, Wealthfront uses continuous deployment[2], while still being regulated by the SEC. I really enjoy their lean startup approach to minimize inventory (ie: code not in production), while still keeping an immune system. And investors seem to agree it is really paying off [3]. [1] http://eng.wealthfront.com/2010/04/findbugs-husdon-and-pizza-driven.html http://eng.wealthfront.com/2010/04/findbugs-husdon-and-pizza... [2] http://www.eishay.com/2010/07/continuous-deployment-at-kaching.html http://www.eishay.com/2010/07/continuous-deployment-at-kachi... [3] http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/19/kaching-gets-100m-under-management-and-gets-all-wall-street-with-a-new-name/ http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/19/kaching-gets-100m-under-man...

bmelton 16y ago
At least in my wife's case, she generally does pre-release QA, and doesn't necessarily do continuous QA. Still though, even if you need support for continuous deployment, you probably want a QA person to set up your automated test cases to test the output of a site in a way that, in my opinion, unit tests don't seem to catch.
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- arosien 16y ago
  Having worked in Silicon Valley for 12 years, I have yet to find QA people who could successfully automate testing in a non-fragile way or without using an expensive, proprietary and crappy testing harness. Those who know how to program are invariably better at writing automated tests. One recent CS graduate should be able to put a team of QA out of a job. (Disclosure: I work for Wealthfront)

bmelton 16y ago

At least in my wife's case, she generally does pre-release QA, and doesn't necessarily do continuous QA. Still though, even if you need support for continuous deployment, you probably want a QA person to set up your automated test cases to test the output of a site in a way that, in my opinion, unit tests don't seem to catch.

deleted 16y ago
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arosien 16y ago
Having worked in Silicon Valley for 12 years, I have yet to find QA people who could successfully automate testing in a non-fragile way or without using an expensive, proprietary and crappy testing harness. Those who know how to program are invariably better at writing automated tests. One recent CS graduate should be able to put a team of QA out of a job. (Disclosure: I work for Wealthfront)